The disposal of the “state” side of the assets of Atlantic Philanthropies, held by General Atlantic Group Ltd., and its subsidiary, InterPacific, had gotten under way in the mid-1990s. This was sometimes a painful process for Feeney. The constituent parts were never impersonal assets. They were “people” businesses in which he was personally involved, to which he had given some of himself. He ran them like a welfare state, said a colleague. The hardest wrench was selling off Castletroy Park Hotel in Limerick, Ireland. Feeney had personally overseen its design and construction and nursed it through its teething stages. He used it as a gathering place for family and friends and here, more than anywhere, he let his hair down and had fun in his later years. Once, he brought about 100 GAGL staff and families for a weekend, and when the band struck up, Feeney and fellow executives appeared in boxer shorts and did a dance routine. In 1998, he organized a trip by 154 former students from St. Mary’s High School in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the hotel for a fiftieth reunion of the Classes of ’46, ’47, and ’48. Many of the alumni, living all across the United States, had to get passports for the first time. Each paid $1,000 inclusive for the flight from JFK airport in New York to Shannon in Ireland and a week in Castletroy. Feeney provided everything else, including three buses to collect them from the airport. They were led into the foyer by a piper in traditional Irish costume. They were overwhelmingly of Irish descent, and many were in tears. “It was the best week of our lives,” said his childhood pal Bob Cogan, a retired federal government representative. “Charlie never left his roots. These were his real, true friends.” Feeney organized the reunion trip again in June 2003, though with fewer people, as time had taken its toll. On July 16, 2004, the last weekend before the hotel went on the market, he brought staff from Atlantic Philanthropies and General Atlantic and family members from around the world to commemorate the break with the hotel he built and loved. Typical of this most frugal of philanthropists, he laid on champagne for his guests, who included many of the friends he had acquired in Limerick such as Ed Walsh, Brendan O’Regan, and the Benedictine monk Mark Patrick Hederman.
By August 2004, Feeney had divested himself of his interests in Ireland, including Heritage House in Dublin, the Kilternan Hotel south of the city, the Trade Management Institute building in Blackrock, and Castletroy Park Hotel. All the properties made sizable profits: the Celtic Tiger economy, which Feeney had helped fuel, had sent property prices soaring. Winding down InterPacific was more complex. By the end of the 1990s, it was employing more than 2,000 people, generating annual sales in excess of $350 million, and holding investments valued at $650 million. The stores in the Hawaiian Retail Group that had caused the bitter split between Feeney and his DFS partners were closed or sold off by January 2003. Feeney came to Honolulu and took a function room at the Sheraton to throw a party for the staff. By early 2007, the Pacific Island Club Hotel in Saipan was still on the books, as was Couran Cove Island Resort and the Runaway Bay Sports Super Centre in Australia, and Western Athletic Clubs in the United States. “There will be no distress selling,” said Feeney, dismissing prospects of a fire sale. “We will sell when the market is rising.” InterPacific also continued to hold a half share in the Laguna Beach Resort in Phuket, where he and Helga would sometimes take short breaks from their travel. They were there when the tsunami hit on December 26, 2004. “Helga and I were having a his-and-hers massage,” he said. “We heard screams and saw fear in the eyes of the staff, who shouted, ‘Get out!’” The hotel escaped with minor damage. Feeney ensured that there were no layoffs, despite the fall in tourism.
In January 2005, Feeney stepped down as chairman of GAGL and handed over to Mike Windsor, with Jim Downey as deputy chairman and Chris Oechsli, Harvey Dale, and Cummings Zuill making up the board. By then the businesses had dwindled to just over 10 percent of Atlantic Philanthropies’ total assets, a reversal of the situation two decades earlier when the ratio of “church” to “state” was one to ten.
“Chuck walked out of the meeting in San Francisco with his plastic carrier bag and said, ‘Well, I’m off!’” said Windsor, describing Feeney’s last day as chairman. “But all this is Chuck’s, and I never lose sight of that. Anything we do strategically, he will still make the final call.”
CHAPTER 34
Not a Moment to Lose
It is hard to establish where Chuck Feeney is going to be at any given time, more than a few weeks into the future. He is constantly on the move. In January 2006, in his tiny apartment in San Francisco, he remarked, “I just did a count: This is the first time in our lifetime we are spending three months anywhere.” But he and Helga were soon off again on another odyssey, to New York, Dublin, London, Brisbane—where he celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday—Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Paris, and back to San Francisco. Asked once where his home was, he replied, “Home is where the heart is,” adding more revealingly, “And where my books are; everywhere I go, I have my books.” On another occasion he explained, “I’ve got the best of all worlds. Each place has an attraction. I think now about convenience, and access to a good newspaper.”
If home is where one pays one’s personal taxes, then Chuck Feeney lives in the United States. The truth is, he doesn’t really live anywhere. He and Helga do not have a permanent home—just small apartments in different cities rented by his foundations, with none of the trophies on the sideboard to commemorate the life of a successful man—though there are piles of books and papers. He certainly doesn’t aspire to live in a mansion. “I wouldn’t be comfortable in an 8,000-square-foot home,” he said. “You couldn’t find anybody in it.”
He is permanently restless. Chuck and Helga practically live at 30,000 feet. And they travel economy class, often sitting at the back of the plane for journeys of more than ten hours. He claims it is a money-saving measure. “It would be different if it got me there quicker,” he says, adding that while he has thought about traveling business class, he doesn’t feel he can justify the extra cost. “A lot of bad-mouths say about me that I want to stretch out on two economy seats,” he jokes.
Perhaps subconsciously he feels that by traveling business class he would be turning his back on the blue-collar culture from which he came. Perhaps he prefers to be in the company of the people who fly economy. Perhaps he feels he is not entitled. Whatever the reason, it is one of the rules by which he lives his life and no amount of pleading from friends and relatives ever made a difference. On an eleven-hour flight from Paris to Cuba in 2004, when his daughter Juliette and her husband, Jean Timsit, were bumped up to business class, she recalled how she pleaded with her father, who was with Helga in economy, “with the usual three plastic bags full of books and papers,” to please change places. He responded, “No, no, no. It’s the luck of the draw.” Worried about the effect on the couple’s health of sitting for long periods in a cramped position, the board of Atlantic Philanthropies has pleaded with Feeney to fly business class, but up to 2007, he was still insisting on the cheapest seats. He doesn’t demand the same sacrifice from his executives, some of whom, like Dave Smith, have had the uncomfortable experience of being escorted to first class past Feeney standing in line for economy with his little wheeled Samsonite case and plastic bag of papers. Colin McCrea and Tom Mitchell were once flying business class to an Atlantic Philanthropies board meeting in Bermuda, when they found Chuck in the Paris airport and persuaded him to at least join them in the business lounge. The receptionist didn’t want to let him in. Finally she said, “He can go in provided he doesn’t eat anything.” By then Feeney was inside, drinking a complimentary glass of Chardonnay.
“Since my earliest days I have been frugal, but I am a frugal person in that I hate waste, at any level,” says Feeney, who always wears off-the-peg clothes, a cheap plastic watch, and reading glasses of the type sold in book-stores. “If I can get a watch for $15 that keeps perfect time, what am I doing messing around with a Rolex?” Helga shares his frugal nature, and the couple enjoy getting bargains when shopping.
On the ground, Feeney always takes buses and taxis, rather than limousines. “I cannot rationalize someone driving me around in a six-door Cadillac,” he says. “The seats are the same in a cab. And you may live longer if you walk.” When visiting the family in New Jersey over the years, Feeney would routinely take the train from New York. His nephew once told Jim Dwyer how he would pick him up at Elizabeth station “and there’s Uncle Chuck, waiting on a train platform near the junkies and the hookers.” His brother-in-law Jim Fitzpatrick pleaded, to no avail, “Chuck, you’ve got to be careful. It’s dangerous to be going back to New York at night in a bus.”
Feeney avoids black-tie functions at which donors are the recipients of mellifluous expressions of gratitude. “I’m just not the kind of guy who gets any kick out of attending these mutual admiration society dinners.” He has no tuxedo now. He once turned up for a formal dinner in Dublin wearing a sweater, and was only persuaded to borrow a bow tie and jacket from a waiter when told he would otherwise draw attention to himself.
He refuses to ask the staff in his business or foundation offices to do anything personal for him. “I’ve worked for people who would have me go to pick up their dry-cleaning, their lunch, things like that,” said Gail Vincenzi Bianchi at the San Francisco office of InterPacific. “He would never. He once mentioned to me that he had some dry-cleaning to pick up downtown, and it was a Friday afternoon and I said, ‘Chuck, give me the receipt and I will drive downtown and pick up the dry-cleaning.’ And he said, ‘No, no, I would appreciate if you would give me a ride down there, and I’ll go pick it up.’” He does not think it beneath him to pick up rubbish in the street and put it in a trash can. “If everybody picked up trash, there would be no trash on the streets,” he explains.
While frugal to the point of eccentricity, Feeney is not mean or cheap. He likes to give people thoughtful presents, often pictures he commissions from his friend Desmond Kinney, an Irish artist. Kinney and his partner, Esmeralda, occasionally join him and Helga on their travels. In restaurants, he insists on paying. And far from being reclusive, he has friends and acquaintances all over the world whom he and Helga meet for lunches and dinners, always with white wine, characterized by his wisecracks and his cackling laugh. He often gathers eclectic groups together, people from diverse backgrounds whose only common thread is that he has met them and befriended them. “Thus artists, politicians, entrepreneurs, corporate executives, university presidents, writers, lawyers, and sometimes his own family members mix freely,” said his friend Niall O’Dowd. The publisher recalled that when spending weekends at the Feeney house in Connecticut in the 1980s, he would come into contact with other visitors without knowing what role they played in Feeney’s life. “There were all these different layers being peeled away every time you heard something new about him.” He learned how parsimonious Feeney could be when his host one day took him for a long walk to the post office in Salisbury, where Feeney rummaged through a used magazine collection in a box in the corner. “Next thing, this multimillionaire comes up with ‘Great!’—an old issue of Time or something.” “If you see a magazine with pages torn out,” Feeney quips, “that means I’ve been reading it.” His habit serves a purpose. The pages provide a means of communication. As has been seen, he will often hand a friend a cutting that has caught his attention, to show what is on his mind.
His life is full of paradoxes. He bought some of the finest mansions for his family but wouldn’t live in them. He lives modestly but occasionally stays at one of InterPacific’s five-star resorts. He was the biggest retailer of cigarettes in the world, yet he abhors smoking. He sold luxury goods but would not be seen dead with a Louis Vuitton briefcase. He made his fortune pushing high-end consumer goods yet dislikes Christmas because of its consumerism. The greatest paradox of his life arises from his relationship with money. He loved making money but not having it. In the early days, he never talked with Danielle about getting rich: His goal was to make a success of his business ventures. “I like the thrill of the chase,” says Feeney. Wealth was a measure of success. Now he measures success by the speed and efficiency with which he can give that wealth away to empower others.
Those who have gotten close to Chuck Feeney believe he is a person apart, a true American original. The common perception is that he has no ego whatsoever. Frank Rhodes maintains that Feeney “is saintly in the best sense—not in the literal sense” and that university presidents around the world should get down on their knees every day “and thank God for Chuck Feeney.” Ed Walsh thinks that Feeney is at heart a Benedictine monk. Michael Sovern compares him to St. Francis—also a linguist and wine drinker—who gave everything to the poor. Sue Wesselkamper believes he is really “profoundly religious.” In the opinion of Michael Mann, “he has made the lives of millions of people in this world so much better for him being on this earth, that if anyone can say on their death bed they have done 1 percent of what Chuck Feeney has done, they would be a very special person.” His Cornell friend Ernie Stern said of his frugality, “I think he’s nuts, crazy, but it’s in keeping with his philosophy; I love Chuck, I believe he is a Good Man.”
Feeney does not see himself as a religious person, nor is he a churchgoer. What drove him, he says, was simply a sense that his wealth was surplus to his needs. “I had one idea that never changed in my mind—that you should use your wealth to help people. I try to live a normal life, the way I grew up. I think there’s something in the makeup of people from the way they are brought up. I set out to work hard, not to get rich. My parents worked hard and they didn’t get rich, but there was always the effort to find out who needed some help.” Had some of that rubbed off on him? “For sure.” Bonnie Suchet, who worked for him for some twenty years, used similar words to explain his giving. “It came from his parents, I think. They helped shape his psychology. He gave it all away because of the way he was brought up.”
Feeney’s five grown children make clear in conversation that they believe their father’s act of giving is something to acknowledge and celebrate. They resent it when people ask them if there is something wrong with their dad that he gave away all his money instead of leaving it to them. They do not feel disinherited. “We don’t see it that way,” said Diane. “We never have wanted to live an extravagant lifestyle. None of us are like that.” They will not inherit billions, but their father set up modest trusts for them “with enough money for what they should, and will, need in life,” and their mother has a considerable family fortune. When people tell them they are lucky to have a lifestyle that involves nice homes and international travel, they reply that, yes, they are lucky, but they are truly lucky in their parents. “We have huge respect for our parents,” said Caroleen Feeney. “I always liked my parents. I took it for granted. It was a shock when I got to school in New York, and other kids didn’t like their parents. I loved my parents.”
Chuck Feeney did not think it reasonable to ask his children to spend the rest of their lives coping with immense wealth, and their children and grandchildren after that. “Right from the very beginning, I felt this just would give them a destination in life that they haven’t earned per se and that I would be imposing on them,” he said. He saw how some family-run foundations were abused by later generations. “He really believes that wealth corrupts,” said Cummings Zuill. “He believes it ruins families and individuals.” He realized “that not all progeny have the same values, interests, or capabilities,” said Juliette.
He did nevertheless want to involve his children in giving. Feeney set up a modest family philanthropic foundation in Bermuda in 1990 that got an injection of $40 million at the time of his divorce from Danielle in 1991. Called the French American Charitable Trust (FACT), it is run by Diane and makes grants of $3.5 million a year promoting a more egalitarian society and aggressively persuading other foundations to give away more money. In 2004, the board of directors, consisting of the five children; their mother, Danielle; Bruce and Margaret Hern from Sterling Management in Bermuda, and fam
ily financial adviser Jean Karoubi, decided to distribute its endowment and spend down by 2020.
All the Feeney children lead independent lives. Diane lives in New York and runs FACT; Patrick is a schoolteacher in the south of France; Caroleen is a Los Angeles-based actress who has featured in eighteen movies; Leslie lives in London and runs a company making handbags; and Juliette in Paris worked in interior design and has taken a law degree. “He always expected us to be productive in some way,” said Diane. “My father was desperately scared that his children would be surrounded and wooed by fortune hunters,” recalled Juliette, “but we have always had friends who were not interested in money.” They lack the sense of entitlement common to rich kids, and they inherited his sense of guilt if they fly business class. Said Diane, “In my opinion, he felt guilty about making so much money and having so much ease in his life. Somehow he needed to redeem himself. It ascended to us, too. I think the responsibility of having so much weighed on him—that and trying to change the world.” Caroleen felt her father was motivated to respond to the unhappiness and the problems in the world because he was more conscious of suffering. Everyone has circles of intimacy, she explained: the first circle exists around oneself; the second encompasses intimate relationships; the third, friends and confidants; the fourth, acquaintances; the fifth, people in one’s neighborhood; and the sixth, the wider world. When there was a news item about terrible things happening in the wider world, people thought it was terrible, “but for my dad, it would be in his immediate circle.”
“My father has amazing humanity, which leads him to get depressed about the condition of our life,” said his daughter Leslie. “He has incredible empathy with people, which has its roots in his Irish Catholic background. He is a real child of his time. One needs to understand those Irish American neighborhoods during and after the war, how they worked, how they helped each other. That’s a big part of his life. He saw his mother and father take people off the street, helping people. He always had a mischievous sense of humor which made him simple and accessible.”
The Billionaire Who Wasn't Page 40